Pushing the case files away, Logan accessed the Internet and spent ninety minutes researching werewolves. The situation he found himself in was, he realized, a little unusual. While over the course of his career he had looked into all sorts of so-called monsters—mummies, revenants, and the rest of the Hollywood horror-movie parade—he had never dealt with werewolves. Zombies could be explained away by the absorption of tetrodotoxin-laced coupe poudre into the bloodstream; belief in vampirism was said by some to be based on victims of porphyria, or mass hysteria of the sort found following the death of the so-called Serbian vampire Petar Blagojevich. And yet werewolves had always seemed—from a scientific aspect—the least explainable to him. And he found nothing on the web to change his mind. He was aware, of course, of clinical lycanthropy—the delusional, even schizophrenic, belief that a person could transform himself into an animal. He also knew something of hypertrichosis, or “werewolf syndrome,” in which victims are afflicted with excessive and abnormal hair growth, sometimes covering the entire body. Yet neither of these fit the true definition of a werewolf: a human with the ability to shape-shift into a vicious, wolflike creature.
Still, there was no denying that the werewolf legend was both remarkably old and remarkably tenacious, having its roots in ancient Greece and coming to full flower in Central Europe during the Middle Ages. And there it continued to persist in the years that followed: in such books as Claude Prieur’s 1596 Dialogue de la lycanthropie, or 1621’s Anatomy of Melancholy, in which Robert Burton devoted an entire subchapter to lycanthropia, or “wolf-madness”—supposedly caused by an excess of melancholic humor—in which the sufferer believed himself to be a wolf. Even John Webster allowed Duke Ferdinand, a villain in his infamously blood-drenched play The Duchess of Malfi, to succumb to the malady:
They imagine
Themselves to be transformèd into wolves;
Steal forth to church-yards in the dead of night,
And dig dead bodies up: as two nights since
One met the Duke ’bout midnight in a lane
Behind Saint Mark’s Church, with the leg of a man
Upon his shoulder, and he howl’d fearfully;
Said he was a wolf—only the difference
Was, a wolf’s skin was hairy on the outside,
His on the inside.
In the Elizabethan-era firsthand accounts Logan managed to unearth, werewolves or wolf-men were usually the result of dabblings in witchcraft, or at times the direct intervention of Satan himself. One such tract, “A true Discourse. Declaring the damnable life and death of one Stubbe Peeter, a most wicked Sorcerer, who in the likenes of a woolfe, committed many murders,” described an evil man who—thanks to the practice of sorcery—could turn into a wolf almost at will, and whose favorite practice included accosting pregnant women, “tearing the Children out of their wombes, in most bloody and savedge sorte, and after eate their hartes panting hotte and rawe.”
Indeed, the accounts and descriptions he examined differed in precisely how, when, and why lycanthropes turned from men to wolves, as well as how much control they had over the process. One thing, however, most sources agreed on: werewolves were at their most powerful, most bestial, and least able to govern their savage impulses on the nights of a full moon.
Logan closed his laptop with a sigh. By definition, his job as an enigmalogist meant he needed to keep an open mind about anything, no matter how strange; his resistance, even skepticism, about the possibility of a phenomenon like lycanthropy was something he couldn’t explain.
Feeling the need for a breath of air, he left his cabin, then wandered down the pathways in the direction of the main lodge. Almost all its hundred-odd windows gleamed with warm yellow light, and voices could be heard faintly on the autumn breeze: no doubt the question-and-answer session following that evening’s colloquium. Logan couldn’t help contrasting the inviting cheer of this vast building to the ancient, haunted, and forbidding structure he had seen rising up beyond the barricade surrounding the Blakeney compound.
Emerging onto the broad lawn, he made his way down to the lake. Here, the voices were out of earshot, and the only sounds he heard were the lapping of water by his feet and the restless night noises of the forest insects. The moon, just grown full, hung low over the water, so large it seemed almost within his grasp.
The sounds of quiet footsteps approached through the grass behind him, and then came a voice: “Good evening to you, Dr. Logan.”
Logan turned. It was Hartshorn, the resident director.
“To you as well. And it is a beautiful evening.”
“This is my favorite time of year. Warm days, cool nights. Great sleeping weather. The summer tourists have left, and the skiers haven’t yet arrived.” The moon lit up the director’s mane of white hair with an almost ghostly glow. “How is your work going?”
“Remarkably well. With the progress I’m making, I might cut short my stay.”
“We can’t have that.” And Hartshorn smiled. He seemed more at ease than he had during their first meeting. Clearly, the low profile Logan had been keeping was putting the director at ease.
“I understand that ranger visited you the night you arrived,” Hartshorn said, with deliberate casualness.
This fellow doesn’t miss much. “Like I told you, he and I go way back.”
“You went to Yale together, you said.” Hartshorn shook his head. “A Yale-educated ranger. Interesting.”
“Well, let’s call him a born philosopher who happens to spend his days as a ranger.”
Hartshorn chuckled. “So he just stopped by to catch up.”
Logan understood the inference immediately: Hartshorn knew about the murders of the backpackers, of course, and he was wondering if—for whatever reason—the ranger who had seemed so eager to see him was enlisting his help. “I haven’t seen him for many years,” he said. “A lot of water under the bridge.”
Hartshorn merely nodded.
It might, Logan realized, be a good idea to throw the director a bone. After all, if he displayed no interest in local folklore at all, it would seem so out of character as to raise Hartshorn’s suspicions—and the last thing he wanted was to have his comings and goings monitored. “Randall has seen a lot during his years as a ranger,” he said. “It seems the residents of these woods have more than their share of tall tales.”
“Which would naturally be of interest to you—given your avocation, I mean. Well, I’ve never had much to do with the locals, but I do know enough to take their tall tales with a huge grain of salt. No objectivity, you know. Except for Albright, I suppose.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Harrison Albright. Well-respected poet. Grew up in the park, then moved away as a teenager. Came back here in the late nineties and has made the Adirondacks his home ever since. You won’t find him passing on rumors or giving credence to legends. He’s giving a lecture here next week, in fact. You might enjoy hearing him talk.”
“I’ll be sure to do that. Thanks.”
“Well, enjoy the rest of your evening. And good luck with the monograph.” Hartshorn smiled once again, then turned and made his way back in the direction of the lodge.
10